12 Sad Love Quotes for Him: Missing Him, Losing Him, Loving Him Still

In chapter 23 of Persuasion, Anne Elliot argues with Captain Harville about which sex loves longer, and Captain Wentworth, at a writing desk across the room, hears every word. Before the scene ends he has slipped her a letter that says "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." Jane Austen built her happiest ending out of a sad sentence said aloud. That is the useful thing about sad love lines: they can carry what is hard to say directly. Below are twelve of them, sorted by the situation you are in with him: he is far away, he does not feel the same, it is over, or he has died. Each one has been checked against the poem, play, letter or book it comes from, and each comes with a note on what it meant there and whether it is wise to send.

Which Sad Quote Fits What You Are Going Through?

"Sad" covers very different moments, and a line that comforts a widow can sound like an accusation in a text to an ex. Start with the situation, then pick the line.

What Can You Quote When You Miss Him?

Missing someone who is coming back is the gentlest kind of sad, and it is the one where sending a line is almost always welcome. These four describe the empty side of the bed, the long afternoon and the letter you cannot stop writing.

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

— Song of Songs 3:1, King James Version, 1611

The Song of Songs is the one book of the Bible that is a love poem from start to finish, and in this verse the woman speaks. She wakes, reaches for him and finds the place empty; in the verses that follow she goes out into the city at night to look for him. The King James wording, "him whom my soul loveth," is the one most people know. It suits a message to a husband or partner who is deployed, working away or asleep in another time zone, and it reads naturally on a card for a couple of faith.

My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you.

— John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne, postmarked 13 October 1819

Keats wrote this from 25 College Street in London. He had sat down to copy out some verses and could not concentrate, so he wrote to Fanny instead, who lived next door to his old lodgings in Hampstead. The same letter goes on: "Love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you." Read in full, the letter is less a declaration than a confession of how badly distance was going for him. Use the first two sentences for a short "missing you" text; the "religion" line is better kept for a long letter, where it has room.

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She only said, 'My life is dreary, / He cometh not,' she said; / She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead!'

— Alfred Tennyson, "Mariana," 1830

Tennyson took Mariana from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where she is a woman abandoned by her fiancé and living alone at a "moated grange." The poem repeats this refrain at the end of every stanza, morning, noon and night, while nothing happens. It is melodrama on purpose, and that makes it useful with a light touch: "He cometh not" on its own works as a wry text to a partner who is an hour late, and the full stanza belongs in a long-distance letter written in a low week.

Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.

— Emily Dickinson, "My life closed twice before its close," published 1896

These are the closing lines of an eight-line poem printed after Dickinson's death in Poems, Third Series, where the editors titled it "Parting." The speaker says her life has already "closed twice," and nobody knows for certain which two losses she meant. The lines are often quoted as a single sentence; on paper they are two, and keeping the break makes them stronger. They suit the night before a long separation, an airport goodbye or the first message after he has left.

What If He Doesn't Love You Back?

Unrequited love has the oldest literature of all, and most of it was written to be read, not sent. If you are tempted to text one of these to him, read the note under it first. For a gentler and more direct way to tell someone how you feel, our guide on how to write a love letter is a better place to start.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud, / Feed on her damask cheek.

— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 4

Viola, disguised as a young man, is in love with Duke Orsino, her master, and cannot say so. She tells him instead about an invented "sister" who hid her love until it wasted her, so she is describing herself to the man she loves while he misses the point entirely. That is why the line is so often chosen by people who have loved a friend in silence. It works as a caption or in a diary; sent to him, it is a confession, so send it only if you mean to make one.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

— Jane Austen, Persuasion, chapter 23, 1817

This is the speech from the opening of this page. Anne Elliot gave Wentworth up eight years earlier on bad advice and has loved him ever since; here she is talking to his friend, but every word is for him. Austen's last finished novel turns on this one sentence, and it is a fine line for anyone still loving a man who has moved on. Quote it without the brackets if space is short, but keep "when hope is gone," which is the heart of it.

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand / Henceforward in thy shadow.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, VI, 1850

Elizabeth Barrett wrote the sonnet sequence during her courtship with Robert Browning, when she was in her late thirties and an invalid and was trying, at first, to send him away for his own good. Sonnet VI is that attempt failing: she tells him to go and admits in the same breath that she will never be free of him. It fits the moment of ending something you do not want to end. Because the sequence finishes in marriage (Sonnet XLIII is "How do I love thee?"), it also carries a quiet hope.

Which Lines Fit a Breakup or a Betrayal?

Here, the best use of a sad quote is private. Writers who were hurt by a man left some of the most exact descriptions of it, and copying one into a notebook can help you name what happened without opening a conversation you will regret.

In secret we met— / In silence I grieve, / That thy heart could forget, / Thy spirit deceive.

— Lord Byron, "When We Two Parted," Poems, 1816

Byron printed this poem in 1816 with a false date of 1808 to hide who it was about; in an 1823 letter to his cousin Lady Hardy he named her as Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, with whom he had flirted in 1813. The poem is about learning that a former lover's vows "are all broken" and hearing her name gossiped about. Its last lines, "If I should meet thee / After long years, / How should I greet thee?— / With silence and tears," are the ones most people remember. The speaker is a man writing about a woman, but nothing in the words is tied to either, and many readers use it for him.

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You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied!

— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 15, 1847

Catherine says this from her sickbed when Heathcliff comes to see her for the last time; she dies a few hours later. It is not a tender line. It is an accusation, and it is aimed at two men, her husband and Heathcliff, who each blame the other. That anger is exactly why readers keep it: it is for the moment when the person who hurt you wants sympathy for how bad he feels. Keep it in a journal. Sent to an ex, it reads as an opening shot.

If this is your first real heartbreak, George Eliot has a kinder sentence. In chapter 31 of Adam Bede (1859), "In Hetty's Bed-Chamber", her narrator says that "there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope." Most quote sites cut it after "sorrow". Keep the second half: the despair feels total only because you have not yet seen yourself recover.

What Do You Write When He Has Died?

Grief for a husband or partner is where sad love quotes do their most necessary work, in eulogies, on memorial cards and in letters written to him after he is gone. These three were written for exactly this kind of loss.

Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee, / Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave!

— Emily Brontë, "Remembrance," Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846

The speaker is mourning her "only Love" after "fifteen wild Decembers" and asks forgiveness for going on living while the world's tide carries her along. Brontë probably wrote it for a character in Gondal, the imaginary world she invented with her sister Anne, but readers have long used it for real grief. It suits a widow or widower years after the loss, on an anniversary rather than at the funeral, because the poem is about how love changes with time without ending.

Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.

— Christina Rossetti, "Remember," Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862

The sonnet is spoken by someone who is dying, to the person they will leave behind. It opens "Remember me when I am gone away" and ends by releasing the other person from mourning. Many people read the full poem at funerals because it lets the one who died speak kindly to the living. If you are writing to him after his death, these two lines can also be turned around as something he might have said to you.

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The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.

— Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, 1972

Parkes was a British psychiatrist who studied widows in London, and this sentence comes from his book on what he found. Its short form, "Grief is the price we pay for love," became famous in September 2001, when Queen Elizabeth II used it in a message of condolence to the families of the 11 September victims, and it is now often credited to her. The longer original is gentler and more exact. Use either, but credit Parkes.

When the grief feels less like sadness than like restlessness, C. S. Lewis named it in the first sentence of A Grief Observed, written after his wife Joy Davidman died and published in 1961 under the pen name N. W. Clerk: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." He goes on to describe the fluttering stomach and the restlessness, and that description can help on the days when you cannot sit still and cannot explain why.

Should You Actually Send Him a Sad Quote?

A sad line can say "I miss you" better than three paragraphs, or it can start a fight at midnight. A few rules of thumb from the letters above:

• Send when the sadness is shared. Missing each other, a hard week apart or a goodbye at the station: he feels it too, and a line gives you both words for it.
• Don't send when the sadness is about him. If the quote describes what he did, it will be read as a verdict, whatever you meant. Write it down instead.
• Add one sentence of your own. A quote alone can feel borrowed. A plain line after it ("Two more weeks. I'm counting.") makes it yours.
• Credit the writer. "— Keats" is enough in a text. On anything printed, add the work, and copy the wording from the source rather than from a quote image.

Three short examples, written by our editors, of how a line and a sentence of your own can sit together:

• Missing him: "'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth.' Your side of the bed is still cold. Come home soon."
• Before he leaves: "Dickinson said parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell. Tomorrow is the hell part. I'll be at the airport anyway."
• To him, after he has died: "You'd have told me to forget and smile. I'm trying. I still set out two cups."

If he is away for a long stretch, our open when letters guide shows how to leave him a sealed note for the night he misses you most, and the love letters for him page has full sample letters for hard seasons.

Who Really Said the Sad Lines You See Everywhere?

An earlier version of this page carried several popular "sad" lines that do not survive a check against their sources. Here is what we found. Our longer guide to misattributed love quotes covers famous romantic lines the same way.

Three Quick Questions

What is a good short sad love quote for him?

Keats's "I cannot exist without you" (letter to Fanny Brawne, October 1819) and Tennyson's "He cometh not" are both short enough for a text. For something a little longer, Dickinson's "Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell" works well before a separation.

What is a sad quote for a husband who has died?

Christina Rossetti's "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad" is often read at funerals. Emily Brontë's "Remembrance" suits an anniversary of the loss years later.

Is it a good idea to send a sad quote to an ex?

Usually not. Lines about betrayal, such as Byron's "When We Two Parted," tend to be read as accusations. Write them in a journal; if you need to contact him, say plainly what you need.

Pick the line that matches your situation rather than the one with the most shares, check it against the original, and put a sentence of your own beneath it.